Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - June 08, 2021


Ep 434 | The Women Against Trans Activism | Guest: Kathleen Stock [Part 1]


Episode Stats


Length

32 minutes

Words per minute

159.23083

Word count

5,112

Sentence count

272

Harmful content

Misogyny

24

sentences flagged

Hate speech

20

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dr. Kathleen Stock and I discuss the gender identity movement and its impact on women and children. She is a feminist and a progressive in many senses of the word, and she has been pushing back against this so-called "gender identity" movement. She and I are coming from two different perspectives in our opposition to what we see as the eraser of women and biological categories. She has a Christian conservative worldview and a different perspective, which I think adds a lot to our understanding of the subject to understand it from every different perspective.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Today I am talking to Dr. Kathleen Stock. She is a professor
00:00:16.220 from the UK. She is a feminist. She is a progressive in many senses of the word and she has been 1.00
00:00:21.740 pushing back against this so-called gender identity movement. She's got a very interesting
00:00:26.640 perspective on this. Obviously, she and I are coming from two different places in our opposition
00:00:32.920 to kind of what we see as the eraser of women and biological categories. I've got the Christian 1.00
00:00:38.960 conservative worldview and she has a different perspective and a different angle, which I think 1.00
00:00:45.240 is so valuable and adds a lot to our understanding of the subject to be able to understand it from
00:00:53.340 every different perspective. So I'm really, really excited for you to hear this conversation.
00:00:58.260 Without further ado, here is Dr. Kathleen Stock.
00:01:06.700 Dr. Stock, thank you so much for joining me. Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do?
00:01:12.800 My name is Kathleen Stock. I'm a professor of philosophy at a British university called the
00:01:18.700 University of Sussex. And I've recently, in the last two years, I've started writing about sex
00:01:26.040 and gender, sex in the sense of biology and gender and this thing called gender identity,
00:01:33.220 which is a increasingly common, popular concept. So I've got a book coming out called Material Girls,
00:01:41.560 Why Reality Matters for Feminism, where I take on this idea of gender identity 0.98
00:01:46.780 and say that there's both some philosophical problems with it and some practical problems with
00:01:52.280 it that mainly impact on women and children. Let's start with the philosophical problems
00:01:57.320 with it. I think you and I are probably coming from, from what I can tell, two kind of different
00:02:03.260 perspectives. We both see some similar problems with the gender identity movement. I'm a conservative
00:02:09.320 Christian, so I kind of have that perspective. You're coming at it from a different angle. So in your
00:02:14.800 opinion, what are the philosophical problems with the gender identity movement?
00:02:20.880 Okay, yeah. So I'm coming at it from, I'm gay myself. And I think I'm broadly speaking on the left,
00:02:28.000 although there's very many different versions of the left, and I'm certainly not on board with all of
00:02:32.240 them. So philosophically speaking, so gender identity is, we are told, a kind of psychological fact
00:02:41.020 about you that's invisible, that potentially anyway, may not be perceived by anyone else. It's detached
00:02:49.480 from the way you dress, what you wear, how you modify your body. It's a feeling in your head. And
00:02:57.480 that in itself is problematic when gender identity is the thing that we're being told is supposed to get
00:03:04.640 us access into certain spaces or access to certain resources. There's also additional problems around,
00:03:14.400 well, there's a huge number of problems, as you can imagine, where gender identity is being
00:03:19.200 prioritized over material facts about biological sex. Because as a society, we organize a lot of things
00:03:28.940 around biological sex quite reasonably. And the modern trans activist movement says that we should
00:03:36.280 deprioritize sex, and we should prioritize this invisible feeling as the criteria, politically and
00:03:45.000 socially. So I can go into the many different areas where that causes problems, if you'd like.
00:03:51.440 Yeah, we can definitely do that. First, I'm curious to hear, in your opinion,
00:03:55.180 how you think we got here. It seems like we kind of accelerated this conversation about women's
00:04:02.420 rights and recognizing the equal dignity of women into where we are now, which is basically that we
00:04:09.320 can't define a woman without being called a bigot, and we can no longer have sex-protected spaces. 0.97
00:04:15.940 How did this happen? It seems like just in the last few years, or was I just not paying attention
00:04:20.540 before? Well, it may be that you weren't paying attention, but I think a lot of it has gone under
00:04:26.920 the radar. So I think the ground was softened up in the 20th century, partly through certain academic
00:04:34.760 movements, which I think are really regrettable. So for instance, within feminism, there was a move to
00:04:43.780 say that womanhood was some kind of social status, and not a biological fact. So womanhood was not
00:04:51.880 adult human femalehood, but something social, some kind of social presentation. And they did that
00:04:58.200 because they thought it would help avoid this problem, political problem of what's called biological
00:05:06.160 determinism, the idea that what your sex determines where you should be in life, and that women should be
00:05:11.360 in the home looking after children, and not be in the universities being educated or whatever. So
00:05:17.260 the cunning move, the cunning plan on the part of some 20th century feminists was to say, 1.00
00:05:24.060 ah, well, biological determinism can't be true, because we're not biological beings. We're actually
00:05:29.140 social beings, and womanhood is just a social role. And that was a very regrettable move, because it 0.50
00:05:35.660 separated out, at least in some circles, womanhood from biology. Then there's another strand within
00:05:44.440 philosophy called post-structuralism, which thinks of pretty much everything as socially constructed,
00:05:51.040 linguistically constructed. So there's no prior fact about it, except what we say about it collectively.
00:05:57.620 And that's very popular in some areas of the humanities. And it's become exceptionally popular in
00:06:03.760 areas like gender studies and trans studies. So the academic stuff was softened, the ground was
00:06:09.980 softened up there. And yet another strain was, again, from the 20th century, some psychologists
00:06:16.520 working with people who are sometimes called intersex, but I would say they have differences of
00:06:22.840 sexual development, say, that's a better way of putting it, because they're not actually intersex.
00:06:27.120 So psychologists working in the 50s and 60s with children who had DSDs, differences of sexual
00:06:36.500 development, hypothesized this thing called a gender identity that they had that was a kind 1.00
00:06:42.500 of sex psychological role that was maybe at odds with the more ambiguous facts about their
00:06:47.500 bodies. And from there, it got extrapolated out to, we all have a gender identity. And moreover,
00:06:55.420 a gender, the new twist is that a gender identity is what makes you a woman or a man,
00:07:00.080 which is never what people were saying in the 1950s, or even in the 1970s. So that is the new bit.
00:07:16.620 There was a doctor in the United States, Dr. John Money, who also kind of developed that theory based on
00:07:24.340 sexual experiments that he performed on twin boys. I'm sure that you're familiar with all of this.
00:07:29.560 And obviously, that experiment did not end well. It did not prove his hypothesis. And yet,
00:07:36.360 even though that hypothesis of gender identity being this thing that, like you described so well,
00:07:42.800 is separate from our biology has lasted. Somehow it has endured and it has been latched onto. And now
00:07:51.300 it's not just defining our political conversation, but it's affecting very tangibly women's protection 0.99
00:07:57.700 and girls' sports and women's rights. So why do you think it is that even though it's really kind of
00:08:05.360 been this whole idea of gender identity being this intangible thing that people can just identify as
00:08:11.100 and think of, how do you think that it has endured for so long, even though we kind of debunked it a long
00:08:19.260 time ago? Well, it fits with a very powerful narrative, which we hear a lot in other circumstances,
00:08:26.060 which is like, you must realize who you really are, you must become the person you were born to be.
00:08:34.000 And that kind of, I would say, liberal kind of narrative fits very individualistic, very concerned
00:08:40.460 with freedom, freedom to be yourself and that, you know, whatever that means. That kind of rhetoric,
00:08:46.560 which we hear a lot and particularly from the States, if you don't mind me saying, fits very well
00:08:52.100 with expansive claims about gender identity. So, I mean, when I was researching this book,
00:08:59.020 I bought a lot of books for kids or teens, which had names like gender identity, discover who you
00:09:05.460 really are or find yourself. And of course it fits very well with capitalism because if there are more
00:09:13.560 than two gender identities, of course, once you've moved away from sex, you can have more than two,
00:09:17.520 you can have non-binary identities, you can have complicated sexual identities, then you can market
00:09:22.960 all those identities so you can make money out of them. So, I think that's also part of the story
00:09:28.460 here, which we shouldn't neglect. Certainly people are able to capitalize on what is now an industry,
00:09:35.500 especially for impressionable young people. When I think about kind of getting rid of these
00:09:43.520 biological categories, which we have recognized, I believe, for all of human history. I also, I mean,
00:09:49.860 I do think about the communist revolutions of the 20th century and what we read about in some of the
00:09:54.980 dystopian novels like Brave New World in 1984. It's not exactly that, but it does kind of speak to this
00:10:01.920 idea of kind of getting rid of any distinguishing factor about a person, making sure that everyone
00:10:09.700 just becomes this comrade and that we no longer have kind of inherent value according to our bodies
00:10:20.440 or according to who we are, according to our families, according to our value systems. We all just
00:10:26.880 become this amorphous blob that is controlled by the state. Now, that's coming from my conservative
00:10:33.380 perspective. And so, I do see the problem with this becoming an industry that capitalism loves.
00:10:40.700 And certainly, we see the big corporations like Amazon latching on to it. But I also see this as
00:10:46.800 reminiscent of things that we saw in the 20th century with, you know, communist and socialist and
00:10:52.780 even fascist totalitarian movements to take away what makes any individual special and just kind
00:10:58.980 of see them as agents of the state. Do you agree with that at all? Well, I mean, from what I've read
00:11:05.320 of the Chinese revolution and the Russian revolution, they certainly knew who the women were because they
00:11:11.180 had to keep having the babies and they didn't have as much power as the men. So, some things never
00:11:17.520 change as far as I'm concerned. Whether it's good or bad, there is a sex reality to our lives. And
00:11:23.760 we're a sexually dimorphic species. We reproduce by sexual reproduction, not asexually. We can't
00:11:31.020 technologically change those facts, although I think some people might be trying. But in the meantime,
00:11:37.600 there is a sex reality that has social effects. And what I think is true about the comparison you've made 0.91
00:11:46.700 is that in both cases, there's an attempt to control language, a very strong attempt to
00:11:52.660 control language. So, you know, modern transactivism cannot change the fact that there are males and
00:11:59.460 females. And there, I think, very likely always, well, there will, there will always be males and
00:12:05.200 females. They can't change that, but they can stop us talking about it. They can take any reference to 1.00
00:12:11.320 womanhood, for instance, out of the languages we're seeing in Britain. There's a move in
00:12:16.600 public policy to stop talking about women and to start talking about pregnant people or menstruators
00:12:22.880 or cervix havers. Of course, all those terms are incredibly biological as well. So, it's not,
00:12:29.080 but none of this is logical. Well, that makes sense. Right. That's one of the many contradictions
00:12:33.440 that I was hoping to talk to you about is that if I push back and say, for example, that, you know,
00:12:39.520 only a woman can give birth. What I hear from a trans activist is that, oh, well, you are reducing
00:12:46.060 women down to her, their capacity to give birth. What about women who can't give birth? Are you 1.00
00:12:49.900 saying that she's not a woman? Well, of course, that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that
00:12:54.440 only people who give birth are women. I'm saying that only people who are the only women, you know 0.99
00:13:01.080 what I'm saying? I'm only saying that only women can give birth. But then they use terms like you just 0.97
00:13:06.540 said, like cervix haver or gestator, which is actually a lot more bioessential is what they
00:13:15.480 would say than me saying that only women can give birth. So, it's a little confusing to me.
00:13:20.560 Well, it's bad philosophy for a start. The whole premise on which it's based, the idea that in saying
00:13:26.940 only women can give birth, you're somehow reducing women to their biology or to their birthing function 1.00
00:13:34.220 is absolutely crazy. That is not how definitions work. I mean, you can also say, and I make this
00:13:39.200 point in the book, only bankers, or at least if you are a banker, you work in a bank, you know,
00:13:44.780 only bankers work in banks. But you're not saying that the most important thing about a banker is
00:13:50.760 that they work in a bank. You're not saying anything about what's important. You're basically classifying
00:13:55.300 some group of people for some explanatory purposes. And being a woman enters into all these different
00:14:01.280 causal relationships in the world, same as being a man does. And we need names to track those.
00:14:06.860 And then yes, of course, then replacing that language with things like menstruator and cervix
00:14:12.540 haver. Firstly, it's demeaning and dehumanizing. And secondly, it's very confusing to people who are
00:14:19.600 not university educated, who don't necessarily know the name for a cervix. So, it's incredibly middle 0.99
00:14:25.480 class. This whole movement is basically educated people playing around with language to make
00:14:30.180 themselves feel good, whilst not thinking about the consequences of what they're doing for people
00:14:35.000 who are less privileged than they are, I think. Right. And I would say that's true of things like
00:14:41.440 critical race theory and critical theory as well. These are all kind of academic theories that come
00:14:46.340 from a few people at the top. And then they try to apply what are just academic theories into politics
00:14:54.480 and into the real world. And I guess time tells whether or not the beach ball that is human nature
00:15:02.020 can sufficiently be pushed down forever or whether, like any beach ball, it's going to pop back up.
00:15:08.300 I think when it comes to gender, progressives or the people who are pushing this have just pushed too
00:15:15.920 far. I just don't think because of the reality that you articulated, there will always be male and
00:15:22.500 female. And biology is just not going to change in that way. There's going to be a pushback to this. 1.00
00:15:30.400 Whether or not you're on the right and the left, it's just an irrefutable truth in reality that people
00:15:36.080 aren't going to be able to escape. Do you have optimism in that direction that eventually this whole
00:15:40.900 kind of movement is going to fall apart because it's just not in alignment with what's real?
00:15:46.720 I don't know. I mean, it depends on the day, to be honest. And I think certain areas are more
00:15:55.140 open to movement than others. So for instance, what's happening to children and to teens, I think
00:16:04.020 cannot stand. We just need more information and more light being shed on actually what's happening,
00:16:11.960 which is children who are exploring their own identity. It's fair enough. We all have
00:16:18.040 aspects of identity. They're exploring their identity. Sometimes, you know, they will turn
00:16:23.240 out to be lesbians or gay children. That is being interpreted by the wider culture around them as
00:16:30.680 them being in the wrong body or them really, you know, a girl who is attracted to other girls
00:16:37.300 is interpreting herself as a boy who's attracted to girls, for instance. And then therapists around
00:16:44.460 them have all signed up to something which says that they can't argue with that. They have to
00:16:48.900 affirm this thing called their inner gender identity, which is described as if it's innate and it's just
00:16:54.700 sort of bursting out of them as if that could possibly be true. So, you know, when all that comes to light
00:17:00.580 and the medical consequences of that for children and that properly gets looked at responsibly,
00:17:06.420 then I think hopefully there'll be some push on that. But what I feel more depressed about is the
00:17:13.880 effect on women and the encroachments on and on adult lesbians, the encroachments on their rights, 1.00
00:17:21.180 their spaces, their resources, things that feminism over, you know, decades has fought hard for. 1.00
00:17:26.300 Grassroots feminism, not academic feminism. Grassroots feminism has fought hard for shelters, 1.00
00:17:33.980 domestic violence refuges, rape crisis centres, changing rooms, bathrooms, you know, you name it.
00:17:41.340 We've had to fight for it or others before me have fought for it. And it's being dismantled
00:17:46.040 now by this prioritisation of gender identity. So that's just not right. But on the other hand,
00:17:52.560 do people care enough?
00:17:56.300 I have a few questions within that. My first question to back up just a little bit is about
00:18:09.500 children. Now, one thing that I've seen that is troubling to me that I don't think is quite
00:18:15.020 mainstream, it was a viral tweet. And then it was also associated with the self-proclaimed communist
00:18:20.040 who hears who lives here in the United States, who wrote a book called Full Surrogacy. Now she is an 0.56
00:18:27.300 anti family. Yes, you might know exactly who I'm talking about. Of course, she believes in quote,
00:18:33.460 taking away the innocence of children. She believes that we all belong to each other, which again,
00:18:39.940 is very brave new world esque and that that will usher in this time of total egalitarian communism and
00:18:46.400 beauty and all of that great stuff. And there was another tweet, not by her, but someone who kind of
00:18:52.100 promotes her saying that children should be given puberty blockers without parental consent and paid 0.97
00:19:00.020 for by the state. So something that worries me, I trust parents to say, yes, look, I love my child. I
00:19:07.580 believe in the best interest of my child. I want to do what's best for my child. And being a 10 year old that
00:19:12.700 goes on puberty blockers is not best for my child. But if that kind of authority is removed, or is
00:19:19.120 questioned by the state or is replaced by the state, then I really do worry about protections for kids
00:19:25.520 who can't even, you know, make their own peanut butter and jelly sandwich yet. That is and I want to talk
00:19:30.880 about, you know, women's rights and feminism, too. But that really worries me about the disintegration of
00:19:38.400 parental rights and parental influence over a child's life in place of these activists and the
00:19:45.140 state who, quite frankly, do not have the best interest of children at heart. Is that something
00:19:50.020 is that something that concerns you as well? Well, I can. I'm very concerned about the unregulated
00:19:55.900 market for puberty blockers. I'm very concerned with surgeons advertising mastectomies, double
00:20:04.700 mastectomies to teenagers on TikTok. I'm very concerned about all of that. But I don't think I'm
00:20:10.300 as relaxed as you about parents. And this isn't because I blame parents or, you know, have some kind
00:20:17.340 of animus to what I am a parent. I know that there are parents who are uncomfortable with gender
00:20:26.360 nonconformity, or I would say sex nonconformity in their children. I know that there are parents who
00:20:31.260 are uncomfortable with the emerging homosexuality of their children, for whom, and these might be more 1.00
00:20:36.540 conservative parents, for whom it is preferable on some level that they maybe haven't properly thought
00:20:42.320 through. But it's preferable to have a daughter than a gay son or, and, you know, that seems to 1.00
00:20:49.900 be happening now. They're not getting there on their own, because there are educators, there are
00:20:54.560 academics, there's a whole infrastructure of LGBT lobbying groups, perversely, because you'd think
00:21:00.200 LGBT lobbying groups would be protecting gay children. But there's a whole mechanism now in place to
00:21:05.540 explain to parents that they might have a child in the wrong body or whatever. That's not, you know,
00:21:12.560 that doesn't involve any kind of wild radical communism that's happening now in relatively
00:21:18.520 mainstream places. Yeah. So I'm saying, I'm not saying you're wrong to worry about unregulated,
00:21:25.280 you know, children acting off their own bat. And it's true that in Britain, you can get puberty 0.57
00:21:29.560 blockers from Spain, you can bypass NHS regulation right now. But I'm also worried about the state
00:21:37.460 doing it. And I'm worried about parents doing it, because we've developed this cultural narrative
00:21:41.540 that this doesn't seem to be much pushback against. Yeah, and I and I agree with you on that. And I
00:21:47.300 think that actually transitions well into what I wanted to ask you about next, you're talking about
00:21:52.440 how this movement kind of threatens the rights and the protections of women and in particular,
00:21:59.000 lesbians. And of course, that's yet another contradiction that we see in all of this. 1.00
00:22:03.500 I've seen trans activists say that, you know, preferring someone's body or having a particular
00:22:10.520 sexual orientation, not being attracted to gender identity, but actually someone's sex,
00:22:15.980 homosexual, heterosexual, whatever, is transphobic. And so to me, this kind of leads to the eraser of
00:22:24.240 the LGB part of the LGBT. And I'm wondering if you think that as well as someone who is gay and who
00:22:32.400 has worked in this realm for a while. Mm hmm. Well, yes, I mean, this is not a wild fringe aspect of the
00:22:39.580 LGBT movement. This is on the GLAAD website. This is on the Stonewall website, which is the UK equivalent
00:22:45.640 of GLAAD or HRC. They say they have redefined sexual orientation to be an attraction to gender
00:22:56.080 identity, as if you can be attracted to an invisible thing that you can't even see for a start. But so
00:23:02.140 now a lesbian is defined by these LGBT organizations. Like, I'm not kidding. It's hard to believe. But
00:23:09.260 if you go, I could show you the pages, they define a lesbian as a person with a female gender identity
00:23:15.680 attracted to other people with female gender identities. Now, that means that a male who I
00:23:22.580 would say was heterosexual, who had no interest in in his sex, yeah, could on the basis of having a female
00:23:33.480 gender identity describe themselves and being attracted to women like females, heterosexuality,
00:23:38.500 describe themselves as a lesbian. And they are some of them. No, not everyone. I don't, you know,
00:23:44.300 I want to make clear all the way through that I'm not talking about all trans people, because actually
00:23:48.100 a lot of trans people are very worried about this, too. It's about powerful trans activist
00:23:53.460 organizations appropriating this discourse and coming up with these ideas and this language,
00:23:59.640 these language changes. So trans activists are trying to redefine what lesbianism is and what
00:24:06.380 homosexuality is and what heterosexuality is, too. But that's obviously impacting less on heterosexuals
00:24:11.340 than it is on lesbians. 1.00
00:24:12.180 Yeah. Do you see a lot of gay people speaking up about this? Because it seems like there's also a
00:24:19.200 split in the LGB community, as well as in the feminist community. There are obviously feminists 1.00
00:24:28.080 who say, yes, we have to be on board with trans rights and it doesn't threaten women. And then,
00:24:32.020 of course, there are feminists who say the opposite. And the same thing within, you know, 1.00
00:24:37.860 within the gay community saying, oh, no, we have to include the tea. This is so important for us.
00:24:42.780 And then there are people like you who say, well, hang on just a second. Let's think about the
00:24:47.000 consequences and the implications and the redefining of these things. Why isn't that more people see
00:24:54.220 this the way that you do? Partly is because they don't really know yet. I mean, there is a big
00:25:00.060 problem with getting this message out, especially in the through the newspapers and media organizations that most
00:25:07.860 you know, left leaning progressives would read. So this is I'm sure this is if anyone's watching
00:25:13.440 this, it's news to them. But also because there is kind of a loose solidarity between
00:25:20.820 lesbians and gays and trans people. And there always has been in the sense that quite a lot of
00:25:26.040 trans women started off as gay men. And also every all of us in some sense is kind of nonconforming
00:25:33.100 about gender. We don't necessarily feel like we fit in the standard issue, heterosexual,
00:25:40.600 feminine, or masculine molds. But and that's, you know, solidarity is great. But unfortunately,
00:25:48.400 the modern LGBT movement has kind of just smushed everyone together. And so there's just one kind 1.00
00:25:54.060 of thing here. And obviously, there isn't one kind of thing here. There's a lot of heterosexuality now in
00:25:59.300 the LGBT movement, where there wasn't before, right? For instance, as and then there's all the 0.69
00:26:05.680 extra thing, the add ons that are now being added, like nothing to do with sexuality to do with like,
00:26:12.000 a being a romantic, something to do with sexuality, but not the same as a sexual orientation and being
00:26:16.360 a romantic or whatever the next new thing is. So yeah, I don't know. Did that answer your question?
00:26:24.300 Yeah. What do you think the tangible consequences of that is? I'm sure that reading a definition
00:26:30.480 like that on the GLAAD website, which is something that you probably don't relate to this idea of
00:26:37.980 having a gender identity that's attracted to another gender identity. I'm sure that's not how you identify 0.81
00:26:42.480 or feel as a lesbian. When I hear words like gestator or pregnant person or chest feeding as someone who
00:26:50.460 is pregnant with my second child, I'm offended by that. And I worry about that too. I worry about
00:26:57.940 the eraser and the redefining, but sometimes I can't always put my finger on what the tangible
00:27:03.980 consequences of that kind of redefining and eraser will be for these different categories. What do you
00:27:09.360 think? Well, they're very tangible for lesbians and they have been for a while. So if you go onto a 1.00
00:27:15.280 lesbian dating site, you will see males. And I don't mean males you can't tell are females. I mean,
00:27:23.120 males you can absolutely blindingly obviously see are males that have put a bit of lipstick on, 1.00
00:27:27.500 if that. And so there's, in other words, there are now people in the dating pool calling themselves
00:27:33.800 lesbians and potentially saying you are transphobic if you will not consider me.
00:27:39.260 And now that people have to think this through. Lesbians are same sex attracted. They are not 1.00
00:27:45.520 attracted to males. There are now males calling themselves lesbians, trying to pressure them
00:27:51.860 into having sex with them. Now, again, I'm not saying this is every case, but it is a documented
00:27:57.740 phenomenon. So that's, so where that particularly bites, I think is for younger lesbians who are getting 1.00
00:28:04.320 to grips with their own sexuality. They're possibly in queer communities where they find solidarity and
00:28:10.040 friendship. You know, there's all sorts of dynamics that can go on there that can be
00:28:14.960 unhealthy, I think. So that's, that's one clear area where this narrative that someone with a beard
00:28:25.140 can be like a male with a beard can be a lesbian really is just not helping. And the other area I 0.95
00:28:30.420 think is, as I've, one I've already mentioned, which is children and their emerging understanding
00:28:35.680 of the world, which must be incredibly confused. I mean, I think we've, we're doing a kind of social
00:28:42.860 experiment here in how we tell children what the categories are, because it used to be, we could
00:28:48.600 point to certain kinds of bodies and say, most of the time that's a woman and most of the time that's 0.99
00:28:53.420 a man. And now we're just messing it all up in the name of progression. So I really would like to
00:28:58.260 know what that's doing. And of course, there's, there's evidence that within trans identified
00:29:03.420 children, um, there's, there's, um, they're statistically more likely to be, for instance,
00:29:09.300 autistic. And there's also evidence that autistic people have harder time categorizing. So there's all 0.59
00:29:15.660 sorts of extra issues there, especially if you're gay and autistic. So I, we really need to shine a light
00:29:22.420 on all of this and look at, um, it properly. And another contradiction, we've, we've talked about
00:29:38.160 these, um, throughout this episode, but, um, it's the reaffirmation that some of trans activism, um,
00:29:47.920 does of these gender stereotypes. And you kind of already touched on this, this idea of a little
00:29:54.860 boy plays with dolls, or maybe he wants to dance or do something that's out of the typical, you know,
00:30:00.440 social norm of what it means to be male, rather than just saying, okay, that's a little boy who
00:30:05.540 likes to play with dolls and that's fine. Or that's a little boy who likes pink and doesn't like to get
00:30:09.980 dirty. That's fine. That's the kind of little boy he is now parents and children, even probably,
00:30:15.660 you know, in some curriculum, um, are being taught. Well, no, that actually means that you're a girl.
00:30:21.980 So it's reaffirming these very, very strict boundaries of what it means to be a boy and a
00:30:27.080 girl in a time when it seems like self-love and self-acceptance is all the rage. We're actually
00:30:33.520 continually telling people, if you go outside of these lines at all, you're in the wrong body.
00:30:39.240 That seems so detrimental to me. It's astonishing. And I mean, again,
00:30:45.020 this is not a fringe phenomenon. This is like in the definition of gender dysphoria in the DSM,
00:30:51.480 which is the American kind of manual for, um, psychiatric diagnosis. And, you know, they talk
00:30:58.540 about what are the symptoms of, um, a gender identity disorder. One of them might be playing
00:31:04.780 with, you know, the other, other sex's toys or an attraction to certain kinds of clothing.
00:31:12.200 When you're a kid, it's fine to do all this. It's fine. Anyway, let me just say, it's absolutely
00:31:17.700 fine for men to wear dresses and makeup and self-adorn. And it's fine for women not to, 0.96
00:31:23.940 but, um, you know, when it comes to children, I just cannot believe that the psychological and
00:31:31.300 psychiatric profession have, I don't know what has happened to them. I really don't know what
00:31:36.400 has happened to them because these are not stupid people and they're not, you would think,
00:31:40.980 particularly conservative. But when it comes to this issue, I've got books which say, you know,
00:31:45.740 a child's gender identity emerges around the age of three. And, and I've, I've seen videos of,
00:31:51.540 um, gender identity therapists talking about looking for evidence in children. And like,
00:31:57.280 maybe the boy picks up a hair clip or, you know, the girl moves towards the action man and these
00:32:02.040 are signs of something inside them. It's just, it's just incredible.